Louis C.K. Against the Common Core

On Thursday morning, thousands of children who attend public school in New York City will be sitting down for the second of three days of standardized math tests. Among them will be the offspring of Louis C.K., the comedian. Earlier this week, he took to social media to express his frustration at his daughter’s math homework, tweeting the questions she was required to solve to his more than three million followers. “My kids used to love math! Now it makes them cry,” he wrote.

Math looks different these days from when Louis C.K. and his contemporaries attended school, and many similarly aged parents have found themselves puzzled by the manner in which math concepts are being presented to this generation of learners as well as perplexed as to how to offer the most basic assistance when their children are struggling with homework. If you are over the age of twenty and not yourself a teacher, it is unlikely that you will have an intuitive facility with a “number line,” or know how to write a “number sentence,” or even understand what is meant by the omnipresent directive to “show your work.”

In several of his tweets, C.K. blasted the Common Core, the federally approved (but not nationally mandated) standards that most states, including New York, have adopted. Parental critiques of Common Core math problems have gone viral before. At the same time, defenders of the Common Core have argued that the standards themselves are not the problem so much as the poorly conceived or badly expressed curricula in which they are often embedded. This defense sounds reasonable enough, though parents whose children come home with worksheets presenting obscurely worded or illogically presented problems and bearing the words Common Core can hardly be blamed for conflating the two.

Some observers, among them Arne Duncan, the Education Secretary, have been quick to dismiss parental critiques of education policy as whining. Duncan may have apologized for sneering about “white suburban moms” who find that after exposure to the Common Core “their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were,” but that he expressed the thought in the first place is telling. It’s easy to make fun of privileged parents who can see no fault in their charmed offspring; one can even imagine Louis C.K. doing it.

But the issue identified by Louis C.K., and by other less well-known but equally furious parents, is not that the material children are expected to learn is too hard. It isn’t unreasonable to expect kids to have learned to multiply and divide numbers up to a hundred by the time they leave third grade—and in all likelihood, Louis C.K.’s child will have done so by June, if she hasn’t already, and be the better for it. The greater problem lies with the ways in which the achievement of those standards is measured. An emphasis on a certain kind of testing has become a blight upon the city’s classrooms. “The teachers are great,” C.K. tweeted. “But it’s changed in recent years. It’s all about these tests. It feels like a dark time.”

Plenty of parents and educators agree with him. After last month’s state tests for English language arts, teachers citywide protested, calling the problems tricky and developmentally inappropriate—as well as questioning the need for three long, consecutive days of testing, no matter the quality of the test materials. Elizabeth Phillips, the principal of P.S. 321, a highly regarded public school in Park Slope, called on members of the State Board of Regents to take the exams themselves: “Afterward, I would like to hear whether they still believed that these tests gave schools and parents valuable information about a child’s reading or writing ability,” she wrote.

In other schools, institutional support has been provided to parents who have decided to protest by opting their children out of the tests altogether. At my son’s school, the Brooklyn New School, two-thirds of the children in the testing grades have been opted out, including all but one of the children in his third-grade class. (On Thursday, rather than take a test, his class will continue their study of the African continent, incorporating geography, science, reading, writing, and even math.) The opt-out movement hasn’t been limited to schools with relatively affluent parent bodies; activist principals elsewhere have also encouraged the parents of their students to take a stand against testing. “We didn’t know that we had the right,” one parent of a third grader at P.S. 446, in Brownsville, told Ginia Bellafante in the Times, explaining her decision to opt out for her child.

Carmen Fariña, the city’s schools chancellor, appears to be a testing skeptic, at least judging by her public statements. This sets her apart from her predecessors in the Bloomberg administration, among whom the reliability of data to measure educational accomplishment was an article of faith. Fariña has talked of taking “the temperature down around testing,” and placing more emphasis on other ways of measuring children’s achievement, including the observations of those who know them best, their teachers. How effectively, or how quickly, this will translate into a diminishment of the tendency to teach to the test is uncertain. (The standardized tests emanate from the state, not from the city.) Meanwhile, the mantra that students must be “college- and career-ready,” and the belief that their readiness can be effectively measured by testing, now reaches into the earliest of grades, with occasional results that would be absurd if they were not so sad.

It seems likely that if more parents with the wealth and public profile of Louis C.K. showed their support for public education not by funding charter-school initiatives, as many of the city’s plutocrats have chosen to do, but by actually enrolling their children in public schools, there would long ago have been a louder outcry against the mind-numbing math sheets and assignments that sap the joy from learning. The majority of children in the school system sit in classrooms with far fewer resources than those enjoyed by C.K.’s children, or by mine. The concentration on testing is only another way in which students are short-changed. Educators have been arguing since last spring that the tests are flawed, and that the achievement gap in New York is widening rather than lessening: in 2013, there was a nineteen-per-cent gap between the scores of white and black third graders in the E.L.A. exams, and a fourteen-per-cent gap in math. “Students who already believe they are not as academically successful as their more affluent peers, will further internalize defeat,” Carol Burris, a principal from Rockville Centre, wrote in the Washington Post last summer, calling on policymakers to “re-examine their belief that college readiness is achieved by attaining a score on a test, and its corollary—that is possible to create college readiness score thresholds for eight year olds.” This week, teachers at International High School at Prospect Heights, which serves a population of recently arrived immigrants from non-English-speaking countries, announced that they would not administer an assessment required by the city. A pre-test in the fall “was a traumatic and demoralizing experience for students,” a statement issued by the teachers said. “Many students, after asking for help that teachers were not allowed to give, simply put their heads down for the duration. Some students even cried.” When a comedian points out the way in which the current priorities don’t add up, it earns even the attention of those who haven’t thought much about school since they graduated. But the brutal math of the New York City school system is no laughing matter.